Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Global Teambuilding
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
I have managed a lot of projects involving multiple locations and one of the things that I found in the vast majority of them is that people would refer to different locations as “teams”. Statements like “The UK team is handling that” or “The Hong Kong team is off today” were frequently made. I always found that a little bizarre--I understand the sentiment that was being expressed, but we were all part of the same team.
And that’s what I want to address in this article: a few tips on how to ensure that people are perceived as (and more importantly identify themselves as) part of the overall project team.
Absence makes the mind grow weaker
One of the biggest challenges that global teams face is that elements tend to be “forgotten”. We’ve all seen situations where meetings took place with one person on the phone and everyone else in the room and how easy it is to “forget” the person on the phone. That’s what we can deal with when working globally. If individuals don’t have a need to work with the remote resources on a regular basis, then they aren’t seen as part of the team.
One of the biggest challenges that global teams face is that elements tend to be “forgotten”. We’ve all seen situations where meetings took place with one person on the phone and everyone else in the room and how easy it is to “forget” the person on the phone. That’s what we can deal with when working globally. If individuals don’t have a need to work with the remote resources on a regular basis, then they aren’t seen as part of the team.
This is made worse if the team has a specialist function that isn’t fully understood by other team members. The remote group can be seen as serving a specific purpose, but not really being part of the project. …
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You suffer for your soup. - Kramer |